The president's popularity rating, which has been steadily sliding since last spring, fell to 66 percent in September from 68 percent in August, according to a national poll conducted by the respected Levada Center from Sept. 11 to Sept. 13. A total of 1,600 people participated in the poll, which has a 3 percent margin of error.
The September rating is Putin's lowest since August 2000, when the Kursk submarine sank, killing all 118 sailors onboard.
The drop is a result of Putin's failure to play a more active and visible role during the Beslan crisis, which ended Sept. 3 in a chaotic battle that left hundreds of the more than 1,100 hostages dead, the director of the polling agency, Yury Levada, said Wednesday.
A decline of two percentage points is insignificant in itself, but it falls in line with a downward trend that has seen Putin's popularity drop every month since February, when it stood at 82 percent, according to earlier monthly polls carried out by the Levada Center.
Levada said Putin's popularity is being eaten away by the population's feelings of fatigue and insecurity in the wake of recent terrorist attacks, the continuing instability in Chechnya, and discontent over pending social reforms.
These sentiments cannot be as easily reversed as the population's dismay was after the Kursk sinking, Levada said.
Putin actively engaged in damage control in the fall of 2000 after being criticized for refusing to cut short a vacation to deal with the tragedy.
"These are longer-term trends, and I don't expect some miraculous event to happen and reverse them, " Levada said.
An end to fighting in Chechnya or a reversal of the Kremlin's decision to replace Soviet-era benefits with cash payments could boost Putin's popularity, but neither are likely to happen, he said.
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